There are some things they don’t prepare you for in radio school.
I traveled from Los Angeles to a tiny town in Virginia for my first radio job as a disc jockey.
My first day on the air was a Saturday.
The jock before me split as soon as I cracked the mic, and I was alone in the building.
The first hour went pretty well. I didn’t “wow” any records. There was no noticeable dead air.
And then, from inside the studio, I began to hear a competing radio station.
I’m not talking about some annoying RF interference. I mean another radio station was blaring from a speaker in the on-air studio.
You see, in the United States we had something called the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS). Within each county, one station was designated the EBS station. In case of emergency, everyone was supposed to tune to that one station while the others suspended their regular programming.
Actually, it was kind of cool. We had a sealed envelope with the secret authorization password and everything. (Just like in FAIL-SAFE.) It was begun during the Cold War, and fortunately it never needed to be employed.
Our studio (and I guess all stations’ studios) was equipped with an EBS monitor. I was hearing our local EBS station through the monitor.
Four things you need to know about that EBS monitor:
1. It had no “off” switch.
2. It had no volume control.
3. It was hard-wired into the circuitry.
And most importantly:
4. It did not mute when I opened the studio microphone.
So for the rest of my show, every time I cracked the mic to read a live radio commercial, spot tag, public service announcement, news, etc….My audience heard a tinny version of the “big” station 15 miles away, through the EBS speaker and into my microphone.
It was a less than glorious start to my career.
As I write this, suddenly I’m visited by the long-buried memory of returning to my new apartment in that tiny town, filled with despair and thinking, “I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’ll never be able to do this.”
But tomorrow was going to be another working day, so I tried to get some rest.
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Awesome story. My first mic crack was in Atlantic City on a Friday night during the summer of 1997 at WAYV. Nerves, oh yeah – I was shaking…
Side note….that same summer I noticed an EAS mesage come off the mini printer in the studio for a ‘Tsunami Warning’ – keep in mind where we were. A few years later, while working in State College (Penn State) for a station there I saw the same ‘Tsunami Warning’ message.
That’s one hell of a ‘TEST’ message from the EAS!
-Justin Phillips
Newsradio 1120 KPNW Reporter/Voice Talent
Good story, Dan!
Which got me thinking …
Will anyone ever forget their first day on the air?
That sounds like my first Airshift . . . well, my first airshift that wasn’t a weekend overnight . On the Air for 10 minutes one Saturday afternoon in January before the tower iced up . I spent the rest of the shift broadcasting to about a 1 mile radius of our tower on reflected power.
Ah, the good old days !